Maybe I really have come home.
Day six of grueling apartment hunting yields results: I find a place I can unapologetically refer to as a flat. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a total Anglophile; I long to say “bloody hell” and “knickers” and “sod it” with all the cool reserve of Helen Bonham Carter, but of course each of these phrases sounds stilted and absurd in my American accent. I have managed, on occasion, to pull off “shag.” It’s one of my favorites, so I just can’t resist. It sounds so much hipper than our American options: “screw” is so pedestrian, “bang” is way too aggressive, “hump” is for fourth-graders. God knows, I’d never use the gooey mess of a phrase “make love” without feeling like a cheesy seventies tune. I mean “fuck” has its own poetry, since it’s all hard angles and no backing down, but it has no warmth, and could never have the cozy yet unsentimental, offbeat appeal of “shag.”
Anyway, the little studio I just put a deposit on is definitely a flat, and so this gives me an excuse to become one syllable more British. The rent is almost reasonable—okay, not under five hundred (forgive me, to-do list), but I had to be flexible and double it. I suspect the landlord is fortunately unaware of just how slick and trendy the place is. It’s an upstairs unit in an old brick building downtown. It’s above a hair salon, and the smell of perms does seep through the floorboards, but not in a terribly noxious way. Speaking of floorboards, that was a major selling point: after all the hideous brown shag and orange linoleum I’d looked at for four days, these hardwood floors, freshly buffed and sweetly golden, took my breath away. In short, it is precisely the right place for a bohemian, scarf-wearing professor to dwell. As soon as I become that bohemian, scarf-wearing professor, it’ll be perfect for me.
CHAPTER 10
Things I presently own:
1) Adorable 1964 Volvo. Green.
2) One laptop computer from Swede. Very sleek, but have not yet managed to turn it on.
3) Hand-me-down futon from Dad. Smells like Pine-Sol.
4) One pair of shorts from Goodwill. A little tight. Discard after first paycheck.
5) Three T-shirts borrowed from Dad. Burn horrifying Nascar shirt after first paycheck.
6) Four Swedish ferns. Dying.
7) One stainless-steel teakettle. Perfect.
Thursday afternoon I move my precious possessions into my lovely little flat and survey the results. I tell myself the effect is wonderfully spare and chic, with that glam-Zen minimalism so many urban hair salons strive for. I don’t quite buy this, but I tell myself I do.
As the sun starts to glow orange in my western windows, I make up my mind to go for a walk. For a week now I’ve been so completely consumed with the hunt for a car and a home that I haven’t had much time to stroll around aimlessly. It feels good to get the sidewalk moving beneath me and to breathe in the greasy perfume drifting inland from the burger joint down the street. The heat of the afternoon is giving way to the cool evening chill sliding off the Pacific. A wayward branch from an apple tree is hanging over the sidewalk; I look around, pluck a nice green one and munch as I stroll.
I meander past the shops on Pacific Avenue, peering into each window: a bookstore, used clothing, a surf shop. And God—oh, Jesus, a music store: Viva Vinyl. The glass door is propped into a wide-open position. It’s held in place with a terra-cotta pot filled with cement, sprouting a tall, iron-stemmed LP with the words Come In splashed recklessly across the glossy black surface in red paint.
Come in.
Don’t. Go. In.
Maybe I should go home and change. Except I haven’t got anything to change into, and I won’t until my next paycheck.
It might not be his—I mean, come on, what are the chances?
He said his store was downtown. He specializes in vinyl.
Yeah, but this is Santa Cruz—college town, hipsterville. There must a record store on every block.
Do. Not. Enter.
My feet are real fuckups. They operate independently, like little rogue states, and yet it’s the rest of me who’s got to face the consequences.
The store is deserted. It’s filled with a dusty, warm attic smell. There’s a wall of decorative vintage guitars on display toward the back; I scoot past the rows of records and CDs to stare up at them. They remind me of dead butterflies pinned under glass: beautiful, perfectly preserved, but eerie when they’re so still.
“Can I help you find something?”
I spin around and there he is, barely two feet from me. His question reverbs off the walls of my mind. Can he help me find something? What am I looking for?
Of course I’ve thought about this moment. In a town the size of Santa Cruz, running into him was inevitable—I knew that. I’d planned a cold shoulder: aloof, busy, pleasantly cruel. I wasn’t going to get caught up. Now I bite my lip shyly and say, “I’m just looking, thanks,” with all the coolness of a starry-eyed groupie dying for an autograph.
“Claudia Bloom,” he half whispers. I see him swallow, and he folds his arms across his chest, pins his hands in his armpits. We stand there, staring at each other for a dizzy five seconds, until an astonishingly fat woman and her three kids come barreling through the door in search of The Little Mermaid soundtrack. I gnaw on my apple and flip through the bluegrass section aimlessly, trying not to be nervous.
Why am I nervous? He’s the one with the wife. I flash on a memory of myself digging frantically under his covers, trying to locate my panties amid the tangle of sheets and watching the door for his gun-toting wife at the same time.
After they leave, a thick silence falls over the store like snow.
“I was just about to close,” he says finally.
“Oh, okay—sorry I’ll get—”
“No.” He laughs. “I mean, you know. Do you mind if I lock the door?”
“With me on this side of it?”
“Exactly. If you don’t mind.” Oh, God. He’s just so damn attractive. There’s some sort of heat coming off him, I swear. An image of our bodies braiding together and tumbling to the floor flashes through my mind. Brain, do not think like that. He’s waiting for an answer. Scoot out the door. Plan of cold, disinterested shoulder is not happening. Abort. Abort.
“Okay. I mean, sure,” I say.
I watch as he walks to the door (that butt—it slays me), moves the flowerpot inside and turns the key in the lock. “So,” he says, coming back to the bluegrass section, where I’m nervously teething on my apple (the thought of actually eating it now seems repugnant, but the tough skin is comforting between my teeth). “I wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”
I force myself to stop gnawing on the apple and shrug. “Small town, I guess.”
He nods. We both start to say something at once; we stop, laugh, start again, interrupting each other once more. “Go ahead,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Nothing—no, I was…” I’ve totally forgotten what I was going to say. “G-go ahead,” I stammer. “You go first.” Claudia, you’ve got a terminal degree, for Christ’s sake—can’t you do better than this? This is thirteen-year-old girl waiting for an invitation to ice cream social, okay? This is not scarf-wearing queen of intellect. That reminds me: must buy scarf.
“Um…I’m just really embarrassed,” he says. “About what happened last week. You know? It looked really bad and everyone was put in an awkward spot and I just…I’d like a chance to